About the cover illustration

The figure on the cover of Deep Learning and the Game of Go is Emporer Montoku, who ruled Japan from 850 to 858. The portrait was done in watercolor on silk by an unknown artist. It was reproduced as part of “Emperors and Empresses of the Past” in the Japanese history journal Bessatsu Rekishi Dokuhon in 2006.

Figures like this one remind us vividly of the uniqueness and individuality of the world’s towns and regions long ago. It was a time when the dress codes of two regions separated by a few dozen miles identified people uniquely as belonging to one or the other.

Dress codes have changed since then, and the diversity by region, so rich at the time, has faded away. It’s now often hard to tell the inhabitant of one continent from another. Perhaps we’ve traded a cultural and visual diversity for a more varied personal life—or a more varied and interesting intellectual and technical life. We at Manning celebrate the inventiveness, the initiative, and the fun of the computer business with book covers based on the rich diversity of regional life centuries ago.